Istanbul (26 page)

‘We are not to pursue any further solicitation from Admiral Canaris’s representatives here in Istanbul.’

‘Why not?’

‘Apparently we don’t want to upset the Russians.’

He pushed a file across the desk. Its subject was Siegfried Maier and it was thick as an encyclopaedia. Nick opened it and read the top cable. A coded EYES ONLY dispatch from the Foreign Office in London confirmed what Abrams had just told him.

‘The Russians are going to betray us,’ Abrams said.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘There’s nothing to understand. Whitehall can’t see further than the end of the war. They’re fools, the lot of them.’ Abrams was white-lipped with rage though he feigned indifference. ‘Bow to the greater wisdom, Davis.’

Nick closed the file.

As he got up to leave, Abrams said, ‘Tell him I want to meet him.’

‘Sir?’

‘Maier. I want to meet him. In person. Arrange it.’

‘Considering this cable, sir, may I ask why?’

‘Need-to-know basis, Davis. And right now you don’t need to know.’

Nick hesitated. Abrams’s expression was inscrutable. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said and left.

CHAPTER 60

He summoned a driver from the car pool and signed out a big Ford. They drove down Istiklal Boulevard, just on evening, the dusk clamorous with the rattle of trolley buses and the cries of
halwa
vendors and newspaper boys. They turned off the main boulevard, and Nick checked to make sure they were not being followed. He saw Maier waiting on the corner, as agreed; his driver slowed down and Maier jumped in.

He looked nervous. No doubt the constant surveillance by the SD was playing on his nerves.

‘I can tell by your face it is not good news,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry,’ Nick said.

‘Why?’

‘There’s nothing I can do about it. My hands are tied.’

Maier rubbed his forehead with his thumb. ‘Don’t you people want the war to end?’

‘Some of us do.’

‘Let me guess, Herr Davis. Churchill doesn’t want to upset the Russians.’

‘I don’t know the reason. Over my head.’

Maier closed his eyes and sighed. ‘They are drinking mashed acorns at home and calling it coffee. My family has lost their house in Frankfurt to British bombs. My oldest cousin died in the Russian winter.’ Nick remembered that Maier had not been much concerned about the fate of British people suffering under the Luftwaffe’s bombs when he first met him in Bucharest. It seemed people only understood misery when they experienced it themselves.

‘Hitler is a madman. He is going to ruin my country.’

‘Someone at the consulate would like to meet with you in person.’

‘I thought you said you could not help me.’

‘Not officially. This meeting would be informal.’

‘Who is this man?’

‘The Chief Passport Officer, Abrams.’

‘He is your boss, Herr Davis?’

‘It’s on a need-to-know basis. You don’t need to know.’

Maier laughed and shook his head. ‘What does he wish to discuss that we cannot talk about here?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Ah, I see. You are on a need-to-know basis also.’ He laughed again. ‘Very well. You will arrange it?’

‘I will arrange it.’

Nick told the driver to turn the car around and they headed back along Cumhurriyet Caddesi into Taksim. Maier made some desultory comments about the weather. Nick told him again that he would be in touch and that he was sorry he had not been of more use to him and his friends in Berlin.

Maier jumped out of the car in a quiet street near the casino and the war went on.

CHAPTER 61

Nick drove slowly down the Street of the Lady. Maier appeared from the shadows of a doorway and jumped in the back next to Abrams.

‘Drive,’ Abrams said.

Nick coasted to the foot of the street and then turned right towards Taksim. At this time of the night there was little traffic and he checked in the mirror that he was not being followed. He drove across the Galata Bridge and headed towards Seraglio Point.

He parked the Humber in a quiet street below the Sancta Sofia.

‘Enjoy your walk,’ Abrams said.

Nick got out of the car. He went up the hill, following the walls to the gateway of the old palace. A cool night, but fine, a crescent moon scurrying between ink-black clouds. He saw the glow of cigarettes in the back of the Humber as the two men talked.

What the hell was this about?

He supposed Abrams and Maier had more in common than a novice might imagine. As far as the Gestapo were concerned, the Abwehr had more unreliable people than the French Resistance and Himmler, the head of the SD, thought the Abwehr a greater threat to security than the SOE.

Meanwhile Abrams was at war with Whitehall, there were mandarins in the Foreign service hated the Jews as much as Hitler did. Nothing was as simple as it seemed from the outsider.

Looking up, he saw niches high in the palace walls where the Sultans had left the heads of traitors to blacken and rot in the sun. They knew how to deal with betrayal then.

He smoked a cigarette, then another. He looked at his watch. Twenty minutes.

A blast on the car horn, Abrams signalling that they were done.

He went back to the car and got in behind the wheel. He adjusted the rear vision mirror to look at Maier’s face but the German’s expression gave nothing away. They drove in silence back across the bridge. Nick stopped the car in the Street of the Lady and Maier jumped out. They drove back to the consulate.

‘Everything okay?’ he asked Abrams.

‘Everything went swimmingly,’ Abrams said. When they got back to the consulate, Abrams went back to his office even though it was well past midnight.

Nick returned the car to the pool and took a taxicab home.

Donaldson did not look fit. A pot belly sagged over the waistband of his shorts, and when he appeared on the mildewed squash court in the basement of the Consulate, Nick almost laughed. But when they started playing, he realised he had underestimated him. After fifteen minutes Nick was doubled over and gasping for breath while Donaldson had barely broken sweat. He took up residence on the apex of the T and ran Nick from one side of the court to the other.

Donaldson bounced the squash ball on his racquet. ‘How are things, Davis?’

‘... Good ... sir.’

‘Happy with your work?’

‘Yes ... sir.’

‘Get on with Abrams?’

‘... Absolutely.’

He straightened, rubbed the stitch in his side.

‘Bit of a queer fish, though, isn’t he?’

‘Sir?’

‘Jewish.’

‘A man’s religion is his own affair, sir.’

‘Nonsense. Be careful of him.’

‘Sir?’

‘He has some unfortunate friends.’

Not the conversation to be having when your head was spinning. ‘How do you mean, sir?’

Donaldson handed him the ball. ‘Your serve, I think. I was lucky those first two games. I think you’ve got my measure now.’

But Donaldson thrashed him again, fifteen to three, then shook his hand and walked off the court. Nothing else was said.

CHAPTER 62

10 miles east of Moscow

Lieutenant General Leonid Feoderev stood at the window of his study and stared at the birch trees, lost to his own thoughts. It was cold in the house, he had not lit the fire since his return from the front line and he could see his breath misting on the air. There was a thin film of ice on the inside of the windows.

Personal comforts no longer concerned him. He was accustomed to the cold. It had been much worse than this at Stalingrad.

It was different when his wife was still alive. He had enjoyed his ease then. But since Natasha had died he had reverted to living like a soldier even when he was away from the front lines. Hard to care about anything anymore.

The
dacha
had been empty for months, there was dust on everything. He had dismissed the servants after the funeral.

The curtains to the living room were drawn. There was an upright pianoforte and he lifted the lid and touched several notes. He could not play; it belonged to Natasha. He had loved listening to her. When he closed his eyes he could hear
Für Elise
and see her lips pursed in concentration as she read the sheet music, her long fingers dancing over the yellowed ivory.

There was a wind-up gramophone in a corner of the room. He touched the needle to the record, a Bach etude.

As he stared at the detritus of his former life, he rehearsed his plan to kill Joseph Stalin.

His battered leather briefcase lay on the study table. Another, exactly the same, lay beside it. It contained a time bomb and explosives. At the next war cabinet meeting in the Kremlin, he would place the briefcase beside his chair and when it exploded he would go straight to hell along with Comrade Stalin.

When they searched the dacha, the NKVD – Stalin’s Gestapo – would find, in his desk among his papers, a telephone number for the British Consulate in Istanbul. As well as the name of an Istanbul restaurant that was a favourite haunt of members of the British Secret Intelligence Service.

Piecing together the last days of his life they would discover that he had been in Sebastopol the previous week to meet the captain of a Turkish merchantman out of Istanbul. Digging deeper, they would ascertain the captain was in the employ of British intelligence in Istanbul.

There would be only one inescapable conclusion.

Feoderev winced and clutched at his side. The cancer the doctor had diagnosed was bothering him more each day. Soon the pain would become so severe that he would need drugs. But he would be dead long before then, he would not let the cancer do to him what it did to Natasha.

He was a soldier, not a politician and fighting the Germans was his duty. But he had always despised Comrade Stalin. The man was a butcher. He could not deny that there would be more than a little satisfaction ending it this way.

Istanbul

Nick was not told the visitor’s name or his diplomatic rank. He guessed he was from the Foreign Office in Whitehall.

‘I’d like you to meet someone, Davis,’ Donaldson said to him, when his secretary showed him into his office. The other man rose languidly to his feet and Donaldson introduced them. ‘This is Nicholas Davis. Trojan was his protégé. Quite a feather in his cap.’

‘Splendid to meet you.’ Nick got a limp and rather damp handshake. The stranger was a tall man running to fat, with thinning fair hair swept back from his forehead and a city banker’s pink-flush to his cheeks. He was jovial and smiled like the devil himself.

Abrams joined them and they all sat in Donaldson’s office drinking orange tea while the man from Whitehall warmed his ample backside on the central heating and chided them gently about the weather, which he thought should be warmer.

But his grey eyes were like flint.

‘Now then,’ he said finally, ‘I wanted to talk to you fellows about Trojan.’

Nick shifted uneasily.

‘How much do we know about this agent?’

‘Trojan was recruited in Bucharest,’ Abrams said.

‘How much are we paying him?’

Donaldson glanced at Abrams, who nodded. The identity of every agent was protected by the use of code names and a control might only reveal the true identity to very superior officers of the Service.

‘It’s a she,’ Abrams said. ‘She’s the mistress of the Abwehr head of station here in Istanbul.’

He whistled between his teeth. ‘Very impressive.’

‘She is considered something of a coup.’

‘I imagine she is. Almost too good to be true, really.’

Silence.

‘Expensive?’ he asked.

‘She’s not working for us for the money,’ Nick said.

‘Why
is
she working for us?’

‘She’s Romanian. Her father was ruined by the fascists and we think her brother was murdered by the Iron Guard. She hates the Germans.’

‘Good story. Sounds plausible enough. But I’ve looked through the file we have in London. Most of the information she has given us has been inconclusive and on several occasions highly inaccurate. For months we were led to believe that the German Ambassador in Ankara had come to an accommodation with the Turks, and on the basis of this information we almost took precipitate action that would have been disastrous. In fact, we wonder if your enthusiasm for this source is misplaced.’